In Australia alone, approximately 50 million financial statements, invoices and/or bills are sent each week to the Australian public, the majority via the conventional postal system. The estimated delivery time of each such mail item, from data extraction from a service provider's database to the physical mail box of the customer, is approximately 3 to 7 days.
There are a number of problems with the conventional mailing of invoices and statements. These problems include the delays mentioned above, as well as financial cost, the environmental impact of producing a paper document and mailing it to a customer, delays in the cash flow of the service provider, and locating customers whose address may have changed. The cost of generating and mailing items such as invoices, bills and financial statements may be substantial, being at least A$1.00 to A$3.00, with more recent estimates as high as A$5.00 to A$9.00, once all costs associated with the production and mailing of the documents have been taken into account.
At present, approximately 95 percent of all financial statements, invoices and bills are handled through the conventional mail delivery system described above. Despite the increasing availability of electronic systems, which make statements, invoices and similar items available online for collection by the customer, or via electronic mail delivery to a customer's email address, the uptake of such electronic services has been relatively low, e.g. around 5 percent. This tow uptake may initially appear surprising, since quite aside from the financial savings available to service providers, there are clearly also significant potential benefits to consumers in opting for electronic delivery. For example, many consumers are increasingly concerned about the environmental and social impact of increasing resource consumption, and especially the use of paper, due to the effects of logging not only upon forests themselves, but also the follow-on effects upon the atmosphere, water quality, and the impact upon dependent varieties of flora and fauna. There is an impact also upon the consumer in receiving and processing paper documents. Depending upon their content, such documents must either be stored or disposed of. In this regard, consumers are also increasingly concerned about privacy issues, including identity theft and fraud, which are exacerbated when paper documents may fall into the hands of unscrupulous parties. For example, important documentation containing personal information, including invoices, bills and financial statements, may be stolen from letter boxes, recycling bins, or rubbish bins. Yet, notwithstanding these and other issues, to date consumers have shown a continuing clear preference for receiving essential mail items via the conventional postal system.
The real and perceived problems with electronic delivery of essential mail items are many and varied. Possibly the most significant, however, are issues relating to security and trust. The conventional mail system provides users with a single point of delivery (e.g. a letter box or post office box), along with the confidence that is provided due to the system being exclusively or primarily operated by a long-term, trusted operator, such as a national mail service provider (e.g. Australia Post in Australia, the US Postal Service in the United States of America, the Royal Mail in the United Kingdom, and so forth). Consumers do not generally feel the same levels of trust and confidence in electronic systems, and are greatly concerned about issues of security and convenience associated with the online delivery of essential mail items.
Such consumer concerns are not entirely unfounded, and many arise as a result of genuine technical limitations of existing online delivery systems. While email is now widely used as a means of personal and business communications, having the advantages of rapid delivery and low cost as compared with alternatives such as conventional mail and facsimile, it is also now widely realised that email is not a direct replacement for the conventional mail system, and that it has a number of significant shortcomings.
For example, the very openness of the email system which enables easy and rapid access and communications between persons all around the globe, is also its greatest weakness. Unsolicited commercial email, colloquially known as “spam”, is now rife on the Internet, and constitutes a sizeable proportion of all email sent and received on any given day. In many cases, the senders of such spam email seek to conceal their identity, and may even fraudulently alter email headers to make it appear as if the spam email has been sent from a trustworthy source. As a result, illegal activities such as Internet banking fraud and other scams are not uncommon. Legitimate mail items may be lost or overlooked by users amongst numerous unsolicited items. In order to minimise the impact of unsolicited email, so-called “spam blocking” filters have been developed, however these are imperfect and therefore tend to allow the delivery of some items that should have been blocked, and similarly may block items, including essential items, that the user would wish to have delivered. The imperfection of spam blocking filters is an unavoidable technical problem, arising from the open nature of the Internet generally, and the email system in particular, and from the impossibility of designing heuristic filtering algorithms that are capable of infallibly distinguishing desirable items from spam and other unsolicited content.
A further consequence of the prevalence of unsolicited email is that it is increasingly common for users to regularly change their email addresses, once the levels of spam received by an existing email address become excessive. This practice further mitigates against the delivery of essential mail items via email, since it is necessary for a consumer, upon changing email address, to notify all relevant service providers of the new electronic delivery details.
Alternative approaches for electronic delivery of essential mail items such as financial statements, invoices and bills include the provision of a web-based interface, via which the user may retrieve one or more nominated essential items. Such web sites are generally operated by or on behalf of particular service providers. For example, an individual telephone or utility company may provide a service whereby users are able to log in and review outstanding charges, and possibly also complete payment, for example by providing credit card details. Individual banks also operate their own Internet banking services, most of which enable users to log in and obtain current financial information, including balance summaries and statements of recent transactions. A significant disadvantage of these types of systems is the resulting number of user names, passwords and other security information that may be required by consumers in order to access the sites of the different service providers. This is not only an inconvenience, but also a potential security risk, since consumers having an increasing number of passwords may write them down, creating the possibility that they may be stolen or copied, or alternatively elect to use passwords that may be more easily remembered but, equally, are more easily guessed.
Accordingly, there is a need to provide methods and systems for electronic delivery of essential mail items that overcome, or at least mitigate, the aforementioned technical and other problems of the prior art. In particular, it would be highly desirable to provide such a system which is operable over publicly-accessible data networks, such as the Internet, in order to maximise convenience and accessibility, while at the same time not compromising security and avoiding the many drawbacks of the existing email system.